David Lipscomb
Will you please show one the necessity of baptism, if, indeed, it is essential to salvation? I am convinced that immersion is the best mode, and, if I could see that baptism is essential to salvation, would be immersed immediately. I wish to get right if I am in the wrong. I am desirous to know the truth and to do it.
God commanded, through John the Baptist, baptism as a starting point to a new life with God. Jesus submitted to it as a duty he owed to God. God recognized him as his Son before the world when he submitted to it and bestowed on him the fullness of his Spirit. Christ himself ordained baptism as the act in which he would be confessed. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mark 16:16). The believing is paramount to accepting Christ in the act of baptism as the leader and the Savior. The Holy Spirit came to guide man into the remission of sins. He commanded those who believed in Christ to “repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38). From that time forward every one—Jew, Samaritan, Gentile, rich and poor, prince and beggar—who came to Christ believing on him was required to be baptized as a condition of acceptance with God. Cornelius, the centurion, “a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God always,” was told to be baptized as a means of his salvation (Acts 10:48). No one from that time forward was ever recognized as a child of God or in a saved state until he had believed, repented, and had been baptized into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
God requires this of every mortal that would come to him and receive his blessing. We know of no higher, better, or stronger reason that any man can have for doing anything. If he cannot do it because God requires and commands it, he ought not to do it at all. Acts submitted to or works done in religion on any other ground are presumptuous, and presumption is the highest of sins in the sight of God. The human family has sinned against God and has rebelled against his authority. God demands everyone should take this oath of loyalty, thus expressing abnegation and denial of self and thus putting on Christ as his Lord and Master, before he will accept any service from him.
We suspect from the tenor of this letter that our friend does not feel himself a sinner, lost and ruined, dependent on God for salvation. The tendency of the philosophy of this age is in the direction of the sufficiency of humanity to discover and work out its own salvation without the guidance of God. If one thinks so, no service is acceptable to God. The weakness, sinfulness, the lost and ruined condition of humanity, must be realized before man can come to God in an acceptable frame of mind. If man was not lost, ruined, undone, doomed, the death of Christ was a meaningless farce. It takes but little knowledge of the world’s past history and present condition to see that without Christ and the revelation of God to man
that man is lost, degraded, worse than brutal, tending continually downward, and that the knowledge of God and his word is the only influence that has ever lifted him up, elevated him, given tone and vigor to his moral and spiritual nature, quickened his intellect, and given him character as a moral and spiritual being.
If he was and is thus dead in trespasses and sins, without the knowledge of God, and God through Christ alone can quicken him, he must accept Christ as his helper and his Savior on Christ’s own terms; and it is not whether immersion is the best way of being baptized, but is it what God has commanded? If it is, man must accept it. For him to do what God commands is merely to accept God’s help on God’s own terms. This he must do or God will not accept him. If God refuses to give help, man must be lost. He may, by the influences and institutions of the religion of Christ, remain a respectably moral man in this world, while defaming the influences that lifted him up; but when he passes beyond this world and all these helpful influences are withdrawn, he must sink down into the degradation and ruin prepared for the devil and his angels. Our only hope is to do just what God tells us, and he said: “Be baptized every one of you.”
